Canine Grime

Pat Hopewell planted the seed. I interviewed the 40-ish ex-punk for this column almost a year ago to the day (December 8, 2005). We talked about the old days of Kansas City punk, and he mentioned this guy who used to play in the legendary Orange Donuts (also called the ODs) and now works at Sun Fresh in Westport.

After that interview, I spotted the guy near the Bird’s Eye frozen peas ‘n’ carrots. It had to be him: hair down to the middle of his back; cratered, scrubbed-looking skin; a shambling walk; 15 or so years older than most of his co-workers.

Last Friday, I finally got to meet him.

Curt Witt‘s band, Dirty Dawgs 101, has booked a couple of eye-catching shows — most notably December 13 at the Grand Emporium, opening for renowned Latino Elvis impersonator El Vez. (It also plays Tuesday, December 12, at the Hurricane.) I met up with Witt and his equally haggard but younger bandmates Jason Walstrom (27-year-old bass player and backup singer, formerly of the Midtown Hounds) and Chris Ahlers (lead guitar) at Freaks Tattoos on Broadway. Ahlers, 28, is a tattoo artist. He was poking holes in a guy and filling ’em with ink, right then and there.

Witt had brought a few bottles of Naked, the organic superfood juice, and he held an acoustic guitar slathered in decals, with a pickup taped inside the soundhole about as neatly as a hobo’s grimy prosthetic limb.

A denizen of the old punk scene, Witt booked shows at the Foolkiller at 39th Street and Main in the ’80s, bringing bands such as Husker Du and T.S.O.L. and hanging with Jello Biafra.

To hear him talk, the old days of KC punk centered on warehouse communes where the “gangbangers” with the most drugs and money were the ones with the resources to form bands.

“The ODs were fronted by acid, basically,” Witt said.

A guy named Eddie Buck was instrumental in the scene. “He got us a warehouse, got us stoned, got us acid,” Witt recalled. At one ODs show, LSD was administered to the crowd, mixed in cups of wine or Gatorade.

The bands of the old punk scene thought of themselves as bands because they jammed in warehouses. Drug money kept it going until, Witt said, “we started making money off music after a while.”

All things considered, Witt’s a pretty strong survivor from those days.

“He’s got multiple personalities,” Walstrom said at one point during the interview.

I looked over at Witt. He kept playing guitar and looking into space. I began to wonder.

“I am Curt. I am one,” he said. “I could be 55 people on certain days and nights … I’m one-quarter everyone, one-quarter Sun Fresh worker, one-quarter Dirty Dawg and one-quarter gangbanger.” (Note to our readers and Witt’s employers: He’s neither really schizoid nor a gangbanger.)

Witt said he did a year and a half in prison on a six-year sentence for assault. While on the inside, he played in a country band called Crusty and the Crustaceons.

“I was just a punk rocker, a fretbanger,” Witt recalled, “and they go ‘Dude, you don’t have a country clue at all,’ and I said, ‘Well, show me.”

Evidently, they showed him. Upon Walstrom’s urging, Witt launched into “Murder Junkies Came to Town,” a country-punk song about when the Junkies, after gross-out frontman G.G. Allin‘s death, played KC and replacement singer J.B. Beverly kicked some audience kid in the head for playing air guitar — an offense in the punk world, evidently.

Witt pounded his guitar, stomping the floor so wildly that I was worried for the people receiving tattoos at that instant (no complaints were sounded) and injecting ebullient woo yeahs and get downs and one hell of a chickaboom between verses.

He did the same for the Dawgs’ “Honky-Tonk Headbanger,” a song inspired by another hero, Hank III. During his performance, a guy receiving touchups to his back-shoulders-and-chest tapestry swiveled in his chair to watch. The illustrated man’s curious but confused expression befit someone not sure whether he was watching a crazy old ex-punk-slash-hippie, a freakishly overgrown child or a piece of local history.

I was seeing all three.